It is now time, fearless readers, to revisit some of the events of 2004
–
the year that a suspiciously well-organized
band of 'Peak Oil' salesmen began cranking up the volume of
their
propaganda
campaign
while simultaneously attempting to shout down any dissenters in the
crowd. Some
of the events that will be covered here have been commented on before
on these
pages, but in a largely disjointed manner. With the benefit of
hindsight, I now realize that what is needed is
a timeline, which I now present, for
the very first time, under an arbitrarily chosen title.

March
3, 2004: Philip Watts, CEO and
former chief of
exploration for Shell Oil, is asked to step down amidst a scandal
involving
allegedly inflated reserve estimates. Two months earlier, Shell had
dramatically
lowered its estimates of recoverable reserves, claiming that earlier
figures had been
faked.
Both Watts and Walter van de Vijver,
who had replaced Watts as chief of exploration
when Watts
became CEO, are forced to resign. Watts is
the first
CEO in the company's century-long history to be forced from office.

April 19, 2004:
Judy
Boynton, Chief Financial Officer for Shell, is fired in the ongoing
scandal
over 'faked' reserve estimates. Boynton's departure is accompanied by a
further
reduction in Shell's estimated reserves.

April 28, 2004:
Spokesmen
for Saudi Arabia's
state-owned oil company announce that they are more than quadrupling
their previous
estimates of recoverable reserves, adding that the new estimate of
1.2 trillion barrels is "very
conservative."

May 29, 2004:
'Terrorists'
again attack the Saudi oil industry. No further announcements are
forthcoming from Saudi officials.

June 22, 2004:
Professor Thomas Gold,
the West's most vocal and influential proponent of the
abiotic origins of hydrocarbons, dies suddenly on the Summer
Solstice.

July 2004: Russia's
Yukos Oil is charged by the Putin
government with tax evasion.

August 3, 2004: Pemex, Mexico's
state-owned oil company, announces that it
has mapped
vast new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico,
enabling
it to
more than double the country's estimated recoverable reserves.

August 20, 2004:
Green Party activist Walter Sheasby, who
six months earlier had penned a piece
exposing
the true backers
of the 'Peak Oil' ruse, dies suddenly, reportedly from the West
Nile Virus.

October 2004: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of
Yukos Oil, is arrested and –
appropriately
enough –
sent
off to a cell in Siberia.

November 1, 2004:
Raul
Munoz Leos is forced out of his position as CEO of Pemex
following a manufactured scandal. As the
Los Angeles Times reported, Laos' ouster came "a week after Mexican
newspapers detailed how his wife, Hilda Ledezma Mayoral, billed the
company for liposuction treatments costing a total of $12,000 last year
and this April. Although Pemex insisted that any of its employees and
their dependents were entitled to similar medical reimbursements and
that Munoz Leos repaid the company, the damage was done." (Chris Kraul
"Mexico Replaces Oil Monopoly Boss," Los Angeles Times, November 2,
2004)

I hope to expand upon this timeline in the coming months, possibly
through tips
sent in by alert readers, but already we can see that, in the span of
just eight short months, two of the West's leading critics of 'Peak
Oil'
theory
turned up
dead and the CEOs of three of the world's major oil producers got axed.
One of
those three oil giants (Pemex) had just announced the discovery of
massive new oil fields, another
(Shell) had
just been 'caught' supposedly inflating reserve figures, and the third
(Yukos) is the leading producer of oil in a country whose entire
petroleum industry is based on the teachings of
abiotic oil
theory. In
addition, a fourth major player in the oil industry, Saudi Arabia, saw
some of its key
oil installations attacked immediately after it had announced
dramatically
increased reserve figures.

The
pattern here seems rather clear: contradict the lie that the world is
running out of
oil, and
you end up either dead or exiled to Siberia.

There is one other thing that I need to add to my timeline: in October
2004, at
the tail end of this extraordinary series of shameful events, all of
which appear to have been aimed at preparing the playing field for the
'Peak Oil' scam, Michael
Ruppert posted a piece on his From the Bilderbergs website in
which he triumphantly
declared, "We
Did It!" Oh yes, Mr. Ruppert, you do indeed gottalottasplainin'
to do. And when Mikey's done explaining his position on 'Peak Oil,'
maybe he can then explain something else that has been troubling me for
the last several weeks: how is it that a seasoned police detective
could do such an amateurish job of staging a crime scene? (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/070506_offices_burglarized.shtml)